Game Review: Kirby: Squeak Squad
2022-Nov-28, Monday 08:39![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
A Kirby game that I'm not a big fan of? It's more likely than I thought. 
Squeak Squad used to be a meme for me (and others) because the contrast between its beginning and ending is so vast. Despite that, there's a lot of posts across the internet asking if it's the worst Kirby game out there. Since I don't play Kirby games for the challenge, I play them for cuteness and fun, I thought this must be exaggerated and maybe there was some redeemable core stuck underneath all the complaints but honestly, the collective wisdom of the internet is right this time. This game took me close to two months to beat, just because playing it was such a slog. I finally forced myself to sit down, do a level at a time, and slowly ground it over over the course of the last couple of weeks, and "slowly ground it out" are not words you should use with a Kirby game.
The meme is good though:
Beginning of Kirby game vs end of Kirby game.
Kirby games are not known for having complex plots because they don't need them, anymore than Super Mario Bros. does. Despite, that Squeak Squad stands out because it paints Kirby as a monster. On a lovely day in Dreamland, Kirby sits down to enjoy a delicious slice of strawberry shortcake when suddenly it is stolen right in front of his eyes. Knowing that his nemesis, King Dedede, has a history of larceny, Kirby immediately springs up and charges toward Dedede's castle to take back his shortcake, and all who stand in his way must perish.
This is one of the main sources of the "Kirby is evil" meme. Kirby's shortcake is stolen and he immediately slaughters thousands on a rampage of revenge across Dreamland. When he realizes Dedede is not the culprit, he simply transfers the target of his revenge to the Squeak Squad and continues his path of destruction. Every single cutscene that shows up, Kirby's thoughts are all about the cake. The cake is all. For the cake, Kirby will blast through every mountain, boil off every ocean, burn every village, and lay every field to waste. It's a striking characterization for someone who usually follows the magical girl model of beating up enemies and turning them into friends, and it makes it hard to connect with even the minimal story that exists. Even when Metaknight shows up and steals the chest that (Kirby thinks) contains his shortcake, Kirby doesn't hesitate or wonder what Metaknight's reasoning is, he just changes the target of his shortcake crusade.
Honestly, "Kirby: Shortcake Crusade" would be a good title for this game.
Zoom.
Okay, so the story isn't just a perfunctory platformer story, it's actively detrimental. What about the gameplay?
The major gimmick of Squeak Squad is that rather than being forced to use every single copy ability the instant you get it, you can save some of them for later. The bottom screen of the DS represents Kirby's infinite stomach, here called the Copy Palette, and by infinite I mean "able to contain five items." These can be either copy abilities, food, or the treasure chests that are hidden throughout the game's stages. Different copy abilities can be dragged together to create a random new ability, the same way swallowing two enemies simultaneously triggers a roulette, and two food items dragged together can create a maxim tomato. So obviously the ability to save abilities creates amazing depth in level design, right? Now that it's possible to gain abilities in one stage and easily take them to another, all those puzzles in Kirby's Adventure that rely on bringing a specific copy ability to a stage where it isn't naturally found can be replicated but with even more degrees of complexity. Puzzles with a series of copy abilities, right? Right??
Ha. No. Not only does this not happen, Squeak Squad goes out of its way to make all the copy ability puzzles extremely easy, with the enemy needed to solve them right there and usually positioned in such a way that they respawn if you somehow lose the ability after traveling the short distance to the puzzle.
But the issue that really ruins the potential of the Copy Palette is that the treasure chests also take up space there, and nearly every single stage has three of them. That means the designers couldn't include any complicated puzzles because there'd be no guarantee that you would have space available to hold the copy abilities necessary to solve them, and it means most of the versatility of the Copy Palette never comes into effect because you're always keeping one or more slots open for the next chest. If the chests were entirely optional instead of mostly it would be fine, but in addition to unlocking new music and new colors for Kirby, they also unlock additional powers for each copy ability and unlock the door after level six to allow passage through to level seven. With no way to determine which chest contains which powerup other than collecting them, that dooms the player to collecting all the chests and thus keeping Kirby's stomach mostly empty. They might as well have gotten rid of the system entirely and just had a separate inventory for the chests.
So how about the fights? Are they good?
Kirby games are rarely difficult but Squeak Squad is particularly easy. You fight the titular Squeak Squad in multiple stages per level, usually when a third chest spawns and one of them tries to steal it, but it's not actually necessary to fight them at all. With a bit of maneuvering you can bypass them entirely, and even if they manage to hit Kirby and steal some of the chests, they're extremely vulnerable to every single copy ability in the game. The way I beat Storo in the screenshot above was "standing next to him and hitting B," which breathed fire on him and stun-locked him for the entire battle. There were multiple bosses I beat entirely by using the tornado copy ability, which makes Kirby invincible while he's spinning, including Dark Daroach, the second-to-last boss of the game. End-level boss battles are one of the few places where the Copy Palette is actually meaningful and even then, it's obviated by the "bring overpowered ability" strategy.
One of the items you get out of the chests is copy ability scrolls that add new powers to copy abilities, and I had to look that up when writing this review because nothing they did was ever noticeable to me during the game. The hammer scroll makes the hammer bigger during charge attacks, the wheel scroll lets the wheel absorb elemental attributes when it passes over fire or electricity, the animal scroll adds the drill attack shown in the screen above, and so on. These are neat additions but like I said, I didn't even notice them until I looked up what they did. Originally I thought copy scrolls let you pick abilities to fill your Copy Palette before entering stages, but there's an entirely separate series of treasures--the ghost medallions--that does that, and that only unlocks directly before the last boss. I won't knock it because I stocked up on tornado and then breezed to victory, but it's another example of lost potential. If copy ability scrolls allowed you to gain those abilities it would allow for more complex puzzle design but instead they added powers that the copy abilities should have had anyway.
There's a reason this is the only Kirby game that copy scrolls appeared in.
Nothing up his sleeve...
I was going to write another paragraph about how the copy abilities are lackluster but you get the point. The main thing I took away from Kirby: Squeak Squad, other than Kirby as a mass murderer, is missed potential. There could have been interesting puzzles, interweaving levels the way that Kirby's Adventure did (though maybe not as obtuse as Kirby's Dream Land 3 was). There could have been a story that didn't paint Kirby as the enemy of all that lives, only benevolent because the things that dwell in the dark between the stars got between him and his shortcake.
But none of that happened. This was supposed to be a short, cute, and fun game I played before diving into Hollow Knight and now I'm going to play a couple more short games before I get there because this one was so disappointing. I never thought I'd be writing a negative review of a Kirby game but the internet is right on this one.
Maybe I should try Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, which is supposed to be the stronger cousin to Squeak Squad.
Squeak Squad used to be a meme for me (and others) because the contrast between its beginning and ending is so vast. Despite that, there's a lot of posts across the internet asking if it's the worst Kirby game out there. Since I don't play Kirby games for the challenge, I play them for cuteness and fun, I thought this must be exaggerated and maybe there was some redeemable core stuck underneath all the complaints but honestly, the collective wisdom of the internet is right this time. This game took me close to two months to beat, just because playing it was such a slog. I finally forced myself to sit down, do a level at a time, and slowly ground it over over the course of the last couple of weeks, and "slowly ground it out" are not words you should use with a Kirby game.
The meme is good though:
Beginning of Kirby game vs end of Kirby game.
Kirby games are not known for having complex plots because they don't need them, anymore than Super Mario Bros. does. Despite, that Squeak Squad stands out because it paints Kirby as a monster. On a lovely day in Dreamland, Kirby sits down to enjoy a delicious slice of strawberry shortcake when suddenly it is stolen right in front of his eyes. Knowing that his nemesis, King Dedede, has a history of larceny, Kirby immediately springs up and charges toward Dedede's castle to take back his shortcake, and all who stand in his way must perish.
This is one of the main sources of the "Kirby is evil" meme. Kirby's shortcake is stolen and he immediately slaughters thousands on a rampage of revenge across Dreamland. When he realizes Dedede is not the culprit, he simply transfers the target of his revenge to the Squeak Squad and continues his path of destruction. Every single cutscene that shows up, Kirby's thoughts are all about the cake. The cake is all. For the cake, Kirby will blast through every mountain, boil off every ocean, burn every village, and lay every field to waste. It's a striking characterization for someone who usually follows the magical girl model of beating up enemies and turning them into friends, and it makes it hard to connect with even the minimal story that exists. Even when Metaknight shows up and steals the chest that (Kirby thinks) contains his shortcake, Kirby doesn't hesitate or wonder what Metaknight's reasoning is, he just changes the target of his shortcake crusade.
Honestly, "Kirby: Shortcake Crusade" would be a good title for this game.
Zoom.
Okay, so the story isn't just a perfunctory platformer story, it's actively detrimental. What about the gameplay?
The major gimmick of Squeak Squad is that rather than being forced to use every single copy ability the instant you get it, you can save some of them for later. The bottom screen of the DS represents Kirby's infinite stomach, here called the Copy Palette, and by infinite I mean "able to contain five items." These can be either copy abilities, food, or the treasure chests that are hidden throughout the game's stages. Different copy abilities can be dragged together to create a random new ability, the same way swallowing two enemies simultaneously triggers a roulette, and two food items dragged together can create a maxim tomato. So obviously the ability to save abilities creates amazing depth in level design, right? Now that it's possible to gain abilities in one stage and easily take them to another, all those puzzles in Kirby's Adventure that rely on bringing a specific copy ability to a stage where it isn't naturally found can be replicated but with even more degrees of complexity. Puzzles with a series of copy abilities, right? Right??
Ha. No. Not only does this not happen, Squeak Squad goes out of its way to make all the copy ability puzzles extremely easy, with the enemy needed to solve them right there and usually positioned in such a way that they respawn if you somehow lose the ability after traveling the short distance to the puzzle.
But the issue that really ruins the potential of the Copy Palette is that the treasure chests also take up space there, and nearly every single stage has three of them. That means the designers couldn't include any complicated puzzles because there'd be no guarantee that you would have space available to hold the copy abilities necessary to solve them, and it means most of the versatility of the Copy Palette never comes into effect because you're always keeping one or more slots open for the next chest. If the chests were entirely optional instead of mostly it would be fine, but in addition to unlocking new music and new colors for Kirby, they also unlock additional powers for each copy ability and unlock the door after level six to allow passage through to level seven. With no way to determine which chest contains which powerup other than collecting them, that dooms the player to collecting all the chests and thus keeping Kirby's stomach mostly empty. They might as well have gotten rid of the system entirely and just had a separate inventory for the chests.
So how about the fights? Are they good?
Kirby games are rarely difficult but Squeak Squad is particularly easy. You fight the titular Squeak Squad in multiple stages per level, usually when a third chest spawns and one of them tries to steal it, but it's not actually necessary to fight them at all. With a bit of maneuvering you can bypass them entirely, and even if they manage to hit Kirby and steal some of the chests, they're extremely vulnerable to every single copy ability in the game. The way I beat Storo in the screenshot above was "standing next to him and hitting B," which breathed fire on him and stun-locked him for the entire battle. There were multiple bosses I beat entirely by using the tornado copy ability, which makes Kirby invincible while he's spinning, including Dark Daroach, the second-to-last boss of the game. End-level boss battles are one of the few places where the Copy Palette is actually meaningful and even then, it's obviated by the "bring overpowered ability" strategy.
One of the items you get out of the chests is copy ability scrolls that add new powers to copy abilities, and I had to look that up when writing this review because nothing they did was ever noticeable to me during the game. The hammer scroll makes the hammer bigger during charge attacks, the wheel scroll lets the wheel absorb elemental attributes when it passes over fire or electricity, the animal scroll adds the drill attack shown in the screen above, and so on. These are neat additions but like I said, I didn't even notice them until I looked up what they did. Originally I thought copy scrolls let you pick abilities to fill your Copy Palette before entering stages, but there's an entirely separate series of treasures--the ghost medallions--that does that, and that only unlocks directly before the last boss. I won't knock it because I stocked up on tornado and then breezed to victory, but it's another example of lost potential. If copy ability scrolls allowed you to gain those abilities it would allow for more complex puzzle design but instead they added powers that the copy abilities should have had anyway.
There's a reason this is the only Kirby game that copy scrolls appeared in.
Nothing up his sleeve...
I was going to write another paragraph about how the copy abilities are lackluster but you get the point. The main thing I took away from Kirby: Squeak Squad, other than Kirby as a mass murderer, is missed potential. There could have been interesting puzzles, interweaving levels the way that Kirby's Adventure did (though maybe not as obtuse as Kirby's Dream Land 3 was). There could have been a story that didn't paint Kirby as the enemy of all that lives, only benevolent because the things that dwell in the dark between the stars got between him and his shortcake.
But none of that happened. This was supposed to be a short, cute, and fun game I played before diving into Hollow Knight and now I'm going to play a couple more short games before I get there because this one was so disappointing. I never thought I'd be writing a negative review of a Kirby game but the internet is right on this one.
Maybe I should try Kirby and the Amazing Mirror, which is supposed to be the stronger cousin to Squeak Squad.
